Word: spacecrafts
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...Drop. Looking skyward, Surveyor spotted Venus, photographed it and transmitted the pictures to scientists, who will use them to obtain a precise fix on the spacecraft. Knowing the position of Venus in the sky and the angle of the camera mirror at the time each picture was taken, scientists can determine Surveyor's exact location...
...months, Moscow had been hinting at new space spectaculars to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. When a brand-new spacecraft called Soyuz 1 was launched into orbit last week carrying veteran Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, 40, it seemed certain that the first manned Soviet flight since March 1965 was aimed at overtaking and even surpassing the faltering U.S. Apollo program. Barely 24 hours later, Komarov was dead, killed in a crash landing that may ground the Russian man-in-space program for months...
...little oxygen or water and too much ultraviolet radiation to support the growth of earthly organisms, and that Venus apparently has surface temperatures high enough to kill any earthly bugs. In any event, the report says, there is little chance that organisms entrapped within solid structures in the spacecraft could work their way free. Thus it is important only to kill microorganisms on the exposed surfaces of the spacecraft either by brief heating or by poison gas, neither of which would be harmful to conventional spacecraft systems...
...contends that the Russians may well have already contaminated both Venus and Mars. In 1965, there was a failure aboard Russia's Venus 3, which was to parachute a sterilized instrument capsule to the surface of Venus. As a result, they believe, both the capsule and the unsterilized spacecraft hit the Venusian surface. A similar mishap that same year may have caused the unsterilized Russian probe called Zond 2 to impact on the surface of Mars...
Problems arising from the design of heat-resistant spacecraft systems have already contributed to the postponement from 1969 to 1971 of a U.S. mission to eject a sterilized Martian landing capsule from a flyby vehicle. They have also forced cutbacks on equipment to be carried aboard the Voyager capsule scheduled to land on Mars in 1973. And they have certainly increased the possibility that heat-weakened Voyager components may fail in flight...